The people accused are, with striking consistency, the people least able to resist an accusation: older women, especially widows without sons; children, particularly orphans, stepchildren and those with disabilities; people with albinism; and people whose appearance or behaviour marks them out.
Research has repeatedly found material pressure underneath the accusation. A peer-reviewed study of rural Tanzania found that extreme rainfall, and the income shock that follows it, predicts the killing of women accused of witchcraft, with the elderly women in a household disproportionately the victims. Fieldwork on child accusations in central Africa has connected them to the strain on extended families from displacement, urban poverty, conflict and epidemic, which breaks the customary obligation to absorb another household's children. Land and inheritance appear again and again: an accusation against an elderly widow can also resolve a question about who holds her land.
That is not a claim that the accusers are cynics. People generally believe what they say. It is a claim that the belief becomes lethal under particular pressures and against particular people, and that those pressures can be identified and acted on.
The pattern is the same one visible in the European records. Anna Göldi lost a dispute with the household that employed her, and then something went wrong in that household.